A Hiatus

I’ve been taught there is a Buddhist principle called ‘sadjoy’. I’m not a Buddhist and so I don’t know if it’s right for me to find meaning in it. But it’s that time, I think, when life cares for both qualities; it holds space for sorrow and elation. Of course we could say that life is always like that – a balance of the good and the bad, the happy and the miserable. But I believe there’s something special about sadjoy. I want to believe it holds qualities that lift the human experience from the mundane to the mystical.

And so my life this year has been filled with sadjoy.

The studio where I attended my first yoga class in 1984 and where I’ve taught since my return from Ireland almost ten years ago is shutting its doors at the end of June. That the studio is closing was not a shock; how I was left to hold the worry and grief of my students was. But we moved through it, together, and we found solutions and alternatives and change happens. It will be all right.

A beloved platonic friendship found a new way to exist. We loosened the binds that had protected us from the world for so long and made other plans. At first I floundered in the space where that friendship had been but change happens. It will be all right.

I thought I knew what this year would be. It would be an introvert’s dream: comfort in the isolation of work and school. And because I could see the road ahead so clearly I filled each day with work and school. Work and school. That’s all I planned on. All I anticipated.

But things change.

I’ve changed.

And I need some time and some space to consider these changes.

The sadness that arrived at the start of the year has mellowed like a long, deep sigh. It’s been replaced by a joy that is so bright and so wonderful I don’t want to miss a moment of it.

Because things change.

And so, I’m taking a little hiatus. It’s time for me to have some fun.